The Principled Champion

How the world’s fastest cyclist, Major Taylor, used support and adversity to win a world title

On November 26, 1878, two days before Thanksgiving, Gilbert and Saphronia Taylor welcomed their fourth child, Marshall, into the world. Gilbert, a Union veteran of the Civil War, had moved his family to Indianapolis only a few years after the war ended and his home state of Kentucky began issuing new restrictions on blacks. Indianapolis not only held better opportunities for the young family, but it would open a door for their new son that none would have thought possible.

When Gilbert accepted a job as a coachman for the Southards, a prominent family in Indianapolis, Marshall soon struck up a friendship with the family’s young son, Daniel. The friendship became so close that the family requested for Marshall to stay with them for long periods of time. Though Gilbert and Saphronia were hesitant, they allowed it as long as Marshall adhered to his Baptist upbringing.

Marshall, as noted in his autobiography, was “the happiest boy in the world” playing the part of a “millionaire kid.” This friendship not only benefited him in the immediate, but also in the future as it would set him on the path to become one of the most popular and successful athletes in the world.

A Boy and His Bike

When Daniel moved away, Marshall was left with a token of their friendship: a bicycle. As a paperboy, earning $5 a week, he rode his bike every day for hours and miles. When not working, he spent countless hours riding and learning tricks. As a very young teen, he took his bike to a repair shop. Out of habit, he performed a trick he had taught himself. The owner of the shop, Tom Hay, asked if he knew any more tricks. Marshall had plenty.

Hay saw the advertising potential and offered Marshall a $35 bicycle (nearly $1,200 today) and $6 a week if he would work for him. After receiving permission from his mother, Marshall arrived every morning to sweep and dust the store, and at 4 p.m., he would begin his bike trick exhibition in front of the store. During these exhibitions he wore a military-style uniform, which led to his nickname, “Major.”

While working at the store, Taylor became mesmerized by a gold medal that was to be presented to the winner of the local annual 10-mile race. Taylor had never witnessed a race before and decided to attend as a spectator. Hay, on the other hand, insisted Taylor take his place at the starting line.

Taylor was all nerves. When Hay saw Taylor crying, he reconsidered his insistence but then whispered to the young rider, “I know you can’t go the full distance, but just ride up the road a little way, it will please the crowd, and you can come back as soon as you get tired.”

Hay’s whisper of reverse psychology may have been just what motivated Taylor to go far beyond “the road a little way.” The sole black rider raced through a thunderous applause, many of the spectators most likely familiar with him from his stunts at the bike store.

Halfway through the race, Hay and others rode up next to him on their bikes and informed him he was well ahead of the hundreds of other riders. Then Hay dangled the gold medal in front of him. It was the final piece of motivation needed. “From then on I rode like mad and wobbled across the tape more dead than alive in first place,” he recalled. It was Taylor’s first race of many and the first of many triumphs—though those triumphs did not come without resistance.

Sources of Motivation

In August 1896, the cycling world directed its attention to the Capital City track in Indianapolis, where Walter Sanger, one of the top cyclists, attempted and succeeded in breaking the 1-mile track record. That record, however, would not last the day.

After Sanger left the track, several of Taylor’s friends snuck him into the dressing room and then onto the track. The crowd’s enthusiasm had hardly subsided before news began to spread that the young local rider was attempting to break the brand-new record. The crowd sat with bated breath as his friends helped pace him and he zoomed around the track.

The 14-year-old beat the record by a full 7 seconds. Later that evening, he would beat the one-fifth mile record, which had been set earlier that year in Europe.

For Taylor’s friends, it was more than just about setting records. “They were fighting for a principle as well as for my personal success,” he wrote. “They were all white men, and had stacked their all in the belief that I was capable of breaking Sanger’s newly established record, … but in so doing they incurred the enmity of a group of narrow-minded people.”

This group of narrow-minded people was not in the crowd, but in the circle of competitive riders. They took exception to his competing strictly due to his race. Not only was Taylor not paid for setting a new record, as Sanger had been, but he was barred from competing at the Capital City track and any other track in Indianapolis.

Birdie and Major

Though he was barred from tracks in Indianapolis, he still competed extensively in races, ranging from 1 to 75 miles. As his fame